Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.
Robert HughesIt is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.
Robert HughesWe've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.
Robert HughesDrawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies โ the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about โ is apparently immortal.
Robert HughesWhen the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
Robert Hughes